"Love," said AP Wavell, "is almost as universal an experience as death, with the advantage from a poet's point of view that it is possible to write of it from personal experience." He was writing in one of the prefaces to the different sections of his beautiful anthology, Other Men's Flowers. I am delighted to find that it is still in print, more than 60 years after it was first published.

There are two organising principles behind the anthology. The first is that they are all poems the late field marshal could recite by heart. "Though his phenomenal memory was well known to his friends, others may query this statement, but it is true and accounts for the omission of works he admired but did not remember," it says in the introduction to the edition I have (Penguin, 1960). The second is a number of headings under which the poems are collected: "Music Mystery, and Magic", "Good Fighting", "The Call of the Wild" and so on.

Wavell's comments on love come in his introduction to the section entitled "Love and All That" and he goes on, rather disarmingly, to wonder whether "a poet, or any man" (he was a child of his time!) should have one love or many.

Well, who's to say? Shelley, in Epipsychidion, is in no doubt as to the answer, and as Wavell notes, many poets conclude that "a singleton heart is seldom a satisfactory holding". Even Browning, the most faithful of lovers, puts in "a disarming plea for inconstancy". "Ah, but the fresher faces," he wrote, and we all know what he means.

I once wrote that "discovering Araucaria was like falling in love" and it was true. The same giddy anticipation of delight. The same frustration. The occasional suspicion that he doesn't take you seriously. After all, it was he who suggested that "First love is indigo (4)".* Which may be why Wavell wondered whether the old music-hall song had a point:

If you can't be true to one or two You're much better off with three.

*Answer: ANIL

� Sandy Balfour 2005.

·Sandy Balfour is the author of Pretty Girl in Crimson Rose (8), published by Atlantic Books.